31 December, 2008

For many years Joyce Reynolds has run an Epigraphic Saturday in the Faculty of Classics of the University of Cambridge. What in the past has been a solo enterprise will this year be a Faculty undertaking in honour of Joyce, who celebrated her ninetieth birthday on 18 December 2008. This celebratory meeting is planned for Saturday 28 February 2009 starting at 10.30 am and ending at around 6.00 pm (with drinks). Lunch will be provided in the Cast Gallery of the Classics Faculty on the Sidgwick Site.

The programme for this Super Epigraphic Saturday is now nearly fixed. Once the programme is finalised details will be available on the Faculty website: http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/.

We also hope, on the regular pattern of these Epigraphic Saturdays, to have some time for a few short Announcements or Queries, i.e. reports on new projects or specific queries and questions where a group of specialist may be able to help with a problem (10 minutes maximum). If you would like to offer such a short announcement or presentation please would you contact me with details as soon as possible.

You are most cordially invited to this event. In order to get the numbers for lunch I would ask you please to let me know if you are able to come as soon as possible and by 15 February at the latest.

Roman Libya: epigraphy, geography and archaeology

The Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica project (http://ircyr.kcl.ac.uk) which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust, aims to publish, online, the inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica collected by Joyce Reynolds, together with related geographical data, provided by the Pleiades project (http://pleiades.stoa.org/) and illustrative material from the Ward-Perkins Archive at the British School at Rome. An associated project, Concordia, (http://concordia.atlantides.org) is producing an electronic reprint of Joyce Reynolds and John Ward-Perkins, Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania.

The aim of the colloquium/workshop is to bring together scholars working on the history, archaeology and geography of Roman Libya; we plan to describe and compare our projects, and to discuss ways in which we can help and support one another, particularly by exploiting new media.

3 December, 2008

This is a report by Shane Brennan (Exeter) on a paper given at the BES Autumn meeting, November 22, 2008:

Mathieu Carbon (Oxford), Sacred Law and Women’s Festivals, From Aristophanes to Mylasa

The final paper at the 2008 BES Autumn Colloquium was given by Mathieu Carbon. Restricted in time by a slight overrun on the programme, he nonetheless was able to engage the gathering with his work on the topical subject of sacred law and women’s festivals. (more…)

The first paper of the day was given by Charlotte Tupman, of King’s College London, whose contribution sought the ‘inscribed laws’ of the colloquium’s theme not in the ‘official’ pronouncements of the representatives of ancient states, but in the more personal genre of funerary epigraphy. Tupman provided an intriguing and thought provoking survey of a number of funerary inscriptions drawn from two very different urban centres within the Roman Empire: Rome itself, and Aphrodisias in Karia. These texts shared an explicit concern for the future mistreatments that might befall the grave sites and funerary monuments of which they formed a part. A wide variety of possible acts of desecration were anticipated by their composers and admonitions to the reader to refrain from such activities were supported by threats of retribution. Tupman’s paper emphasised the diversity of these elements, with a particular interest in the broader differences between the conventions of the two sites, but also the patterns and themes, which can be observed among them, and are suggestive, at the least, of many aspects of their legal and social contexts. (more…)